Left-inclined readers ask why I criticize Democratic ineptitude when the real problem is the Republican disgrace of embracing a despotically inclined megalomaniac who poses an existential threat to the country.
The reason is that Republican disgrace is the given factor in American political failure. The variable is Democrats' ability to deliver the desired option that a record 81 million voters ventured into a pandemic to choose.
Left-inclined readers ask why I side with moderates, centrists, independents and swing voters when it's obvious they can't deliver victories unless the base is intact and motivated. Those readers point out that it's the base that donates money, licks envelopes, makes phone calls and canvasses door-to-door. Moderates, centrists, independents and swing voters sit around, overly pliable, waiting to vote either way when one way is a disgrace and the other our only alternative.
The reason is that the aforementioned despotically inclined megalomaniac so toxified the American political condition that--while the Republican base is a direct threat to American democracy and the Democratic base a direct threat only to itself by self-defeating political impracticality--Democratic political malfeasance indirectly enhances the existential threat.
When I made a social-media post the other day saying that President Biden had blundered yet again by deciding to try to lead by road rage, by calling the other side Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis, a respondent turned profane to say I should make up my mind. He said first I criticize "Sleepy Joe" and now I fault him for waking.
That's simply false. On this occasion, no matter how rare, I am consistent.
In November 2020, I wrote that Biden won the presidency because he was the only viable option on the ballot to the existential threat, which the American people nobly spoke to reject. I wrote that his mandate was nothing about policy but totally about getting a weary country through the hangover from the preceding four years by delivering the bliss of boring competence.
We'd be better off if Joe had been asleep behind a "do not disturb" sign and a Secret Service blockade when those people came to talk to him about the time supposedly being right for $6 trillion or $3 trillion and then lesser amounts along a Democratic wish list's inevitable political plummet to zero.
We'd be better off if Joe had still been asleep when those people came to talk to him about the supposed imperative of going to Georgia and firing up the base by calling names of people not willing to blow up the center-leveraging filibuster so that a massive voting-rights bill could be passed by a bare-minimum majority.
A sleeping Joe would be in the high 40s at least in popularity. He'd be that low only because of the virus, gas prices, inflation and supply-chain woes--all his responsibility but none his fault.
Quinnipiac's poll had his job approval at 33 percent last week and it was all his fault.
You can beat a despotically inclined megalomaniac with job approval in the high 40s. At 33, you are handing him the keys to the place he defiled, to our house, the one he sat in and chortled as uninformed, primitive yahoos whom he dispatched invaded the U.S. Capitol to try to stop with violence a constitutional exercise to transfer power on the command of 81 million voters.
Major legislation can be passed right now only from the bipartisan center, as on the infrastructure bill, which, to remind, was worked out by a dozen senators equally divided, Democratic and Republican, who took Biden's original number and pared it.
A domestic spending program could have been passed only by doing fewer things fully rather than everything imaginable partially.
And now the only way to protect voting at all while insurrectionist-supportive state legislators restrict it is to activate that same bipartisan Senate coalition to pare that bill like the infrastructure bill, settling on two or three things to get done. After all, two or three is more than none.
If no compromise could be reached, you could say you tried, that you reached out to the better Republicans--Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkow- ski, Susan Collins, Rob Portman, Ben Sasse and Bill Cassidy--and even they showed an intransigence that revealed the insurrectionist-supportive party's unwillingness to serve voter convenience.
Then you might better make a case to blow up the filibuster. But I wouldn't do it even then.
Instead I'd make the message strong that Democrats are trying to be cooperatively pragmatic and Republicans aren't, trusting that most of those 81 million people who voted out the despotically inclined megalomaniac are still there, slowly getting over their hangover rather than drunk again.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.